A few years ago, a player on the quiz show The Chase did not know what kind of aromatized wine had been produced in Samobor since Napoleon's time, and the host incorrectly told him it was bermet. It is true that until a few decades ago, there was talk that the recipe for bermet was brought to Samobor by French soldiers. Many even pronounced the name in French, with the emphasis on the second syllable. But the truth is that the name of this excellent bittersweet drink has nothing to do with the French language. Bermet is a distorted German word wermut, which means wormwood. The Germans used it as a medicine as early as the 16th century. The pure Croatian name for bermet would be Pelinkovac.
The French do not know about bermet
Today, Pelinkovac is no longer wine, but a liqueur, or a distillate in which the leaves of wormwood were macerated (soaked). Wormwood is also found in bermet, along with Mediterranean fruits, and its base is wine made from the red varieties Portugisca and Francovka. If I, as a Samobor resident, had been asked this question on a quiz, I would have also answered that I didn't know because there has been no aromatized wine produced in Samobor exactly since the Napoleonic era. If a player was eliminated from the quiz because of this question, they owe him at least an apology, and maybe a lot more than that.
Bermet is not the only drink related to Samobor about which false information can be found on Google. If you type in the first Croatian sparkling wine, the first articles that will appear will be about the Slatina sparkling wine, the production of which began in 1864. Anyone who tries to check this information may come across an article about the First Dalmatian-Croatian-Slavonian Economic Exhibition in 1864 in Zagreb, on the site of the present-day Croatian National Theatre.
Champagne made out of Croatian wine
The catalogue from that exhibition states that Franjo Pokorny exhibited champagne made from Croatian wine. At that time, sparkling wines could be called Champagnes, and if Pokorny exhibited it in 1864, it means that he made it at least a year earlier. So, the one from Slatina could not possibly have been the first in Croatia. However, a small Champagne factory was founded in Samobor around 1800. Tihana Luetić mentions it in her work Demographic analysis of the population of the city of Samobor from the end of the 18th century to 1857 with the note that the factory did not last long.
Even that was not the first production of sparkling wine in Croatia either. That honor is due to Primorje, around Bakar and Novi Vinodolski, where in the second half of the 18th century they planted vineyards on terraces, and from those grapes they made Vodica, a naturally sparkling wine made using the rural method, similar to one used in Piedmont, Italy, for Asti Spumante wines. The second fermentation took place in the bottle, but no liqueur was added to regulate the alcohol, sweetness and aroma. These wines were sweet, and a similar sparkling wine was also made in Limoux in southwest France. The technique was called the méthode ancestrale.
Dom Perignon loved it, but he didn't invent it
It is reliably known that sparkling wine was available even before the birth of Pierre Pérignon (1638-1715), the monk whose name is now borne by the most famous sparkling wine in the world. Dom Perignon, therefore, did not invent champagne. There is a record of production in Limoux from 1531, and sparkling wines were also made in England until the 16th century, when viticulture and winemaking on the Island died out after the plague ravaged the villages. The incorrect information about Champagne as the cradle of sparkling wines has disappeared from Google. It is time for everyone who wants to write about wine in our country to start checking where they are copying from.
